The present invention relates generally to dictation transcription. More particularly, this invention pertains to enabling real time dictation transcription for data entry compatible with electronic health records.
In clinical settings, patient records are dictated by a caregiver (e.g., physician) and subsequently transcribed for review of accuracy by the caregiver prior to entry in to a health record, whether that record is paper or electronic. Transcription may be partially assisted by voice recognition technology in that transcribers are provided with text derived by a computer from recorded dictation. While generally accurate, the text is manually reviewed and edited because it often contains at least a few errors. The edited text is subsequently provided back to the physician at a later time (e.g., the next day) for final review before entry in to the electronic record. This has the obvious downside of delay which, in a busy practice, can result in loss of data (e.g., the physician not recalling all aspects of the patient care and the dictated notes) and inefficiency (e.g., the physician having to sit down and take the time to recall the entire previous day).
Receiving dictation on mobile devices (e.g., cellular phones, tablets, etc.) is preferred because a physician (i.e., caregiver) can dictate notes and other relevant health record fields immediately while the information is fresh in the mind of the caregiver. However, mobile devices have somewhat limited processing power and storage capacity as compared to the servers necessary to do detailed medical record dictation transcription in reasonable amounts of time. That is, transcription must be done after dictation is completed, and storing and editing large templates in real time are generally somewhat frustrating experiences due to the limited RAM and processing speed of mobile devices.